Computing

Mendel in his elegant genetic experiments with peas clearly demonstrated the digital nature of inheritance by showing that the so called recessive traits of the first generation, while not overt in the second generation, re-emerged on crossing the second generation as overt traits in the third generation.

Standard charts of the Indo-European language family tree shows a Eurocentric bias by showing Greek, Italic, Germanic, Slavic, Celtic, Baltic and even Armenian and Albanian as direct daughter languages of Indo-European, while Sanskrit is a grand-daughter or sub-branch of Indo-Iranian. No plausible explanation is given why Lithuanian, which is spoken in a land farthest from India is closer to Sanskrit than languages spoken in the in between countries. It is painfully obvious that Greek has significant ancestral relationship to German and English and to the Slavic tongues. Latin has major contributions to English, which may be attributed to later Roman and Norman conquests, but the Greek connection has to be via German and thus it is arbitrary to assign Germanic languages a direct descent from Indo-European and equally improbable that the Celtic languages would have the same privileged position.

This would imply that these eight direct descendents peeled off one by one without significant contact or intermingling with each group taking separate and direct scheduled flights from Proto-Indo- European international airport in the Caucasus to their respective homelands.

Without pursuing this murky controversy, let me try and give you some of the sources of the different genetic components of English, which still betray their origin after millennia. Saxon and Norman heritages are the most recent and a good place to start.

There are however situations in linguistic inheritance where words have been common to both Greek and Latin and this is why, I object to the separate, direct descent of these two from the Indo-European mother tongue. To end on a lighter note and to highlight the chutzpah and the ignorance of prior history or preconceived notions on the part of the American inventor, who unwittingly and serendipitously (derived from Sinhal Dweep), first performed recombinant linguistic genetics, I beam my tribute. Did you guess-it is tele from Greek meaning far and vision from Latin. Nobody prior that, had added a Greek prefix to a Latin derived word.

//Standard charts of the Indo-European language family tree shows a Eurocentric bias by showing Greek, Italic, Germanic, Slavic, Celtic, Baltic and even Armenian and Albanian as direct daughter languages of Indo-European, while Sanskrit is a grand-daughter or sub-branch of Indo-Iranian.//

This is so because Sanskrit shares too many traits with Old Persian to classify it as a direct branch without sharing common heritage intermediate between them and Proto-Indo-European.

Btw, Italic is often coupled with Celtic becoming Italo-Celtic, precisely because Latin and other ancient (extinct) Italian languages have common traits with ancient Celtic languages. So much so, it is said that Caesar wrote in Greek to his generals in Gaul because the Gauls could decipher Latin.

And Slavic is also coupled with Baltic because of a large amount of similarities between them.

//No plausible explanation is given why Lithuanian, which is spoken in a land farthest from India is closer to Sanskrit than languages spoken in the in between countries.//

If you ever taken a look into Lithuanian etymology, grammar and lexicon, it has more things in common with Germanic and Slavic. Such as the Lithuanian plural instrumental and dative cases in second declension nouns (-omis, -oms) compared to Russian instrumental and dative (-ami, -am), and Gothic dative plural (-em).

Its so-called exceptional similarities with Sanskrit is because of its conservative structure, the same degree of similarity Latin and Gothic has.